WNY DNUG July Meeting

Date:  7/6/2009
Time:  6:00pm - 8:30pm
Topic:  State of .NET Technologies
Presenter:  Markus Egger
Location:  Daemen College, Schenck Hall, Room 210
Registration:  Email events@wnydnug.org
Food:  Free food sponsored by INETA
Swag:  Over 25 items. 

About the Presenter:

Markus Egger is the President and Chief Software Architect of EPS Software Corp. as well as the Publisher of CoDe Magazine. EPS is a custom software development and consulting firm located in Houston, Texas (USA) and Salzburg (Austria). He specializes in consulting for advanced business applications built on the Microsoft platform. EPS does most of its development using Microsoft Visual Studio (.NET) and SQL Server (among other technologies). EPS has worked on numerous software projects for Fortune 500 companies including Philip Morris, Qualcomm, Shell and Microsoft. Markus has also worked as a contractor for the Microsoft Visual Studio team.

Markus is an international speaker having presented sessions at numerous conferences including a number of conferences in North America, Europe, and South America. Markus has written numerous articles for publications including CoDe Magazine, MSDN Magazine, Visual Studio Magazine, ASP.NET Pro Magazine, FoxPro Advisor, Fuchs, FoxTalk and Microsoft Office & Database Journal. Markus is the publisher of CoDe Magazine, a .NET publication focusing in technologies such as .NET and Web Development. Markus has written a book about Advanced Object Oriented Programming. Markus also received the Microsoft MVP Award (consecutively, from 1996 to 2007, making him one of the longest-running MVPs) for his contributions to the developer community. Markus has also been named a "Tablet PC Influential Developer", ( a.k.a. "Tablet PC Guru"), an honor Microsoft awarded to the 10 most influential developers in the worldwide Tablet PC market. Visual LandPro, one of the applications Markus was in charge of, was nominated for the Microsoft Excellence Awards three times. You can contact Markus via email (megger@eps-software.com) or visit him online (www.eps-software.com and www.MarkusEgger.com).

More on the Presentation:

What is the state of .NET today? Which of the many .NET technologies have gained traction? Which ones can you ignore for now? What is new in .NET 3.5 and the coming .NET 4.0? What other Microsoft technologies should you include in your development efforts? This event is It is designed for developers as well as (IT) decision makers. Specific prior knowledge is not required.

Topics will include the following:
• Silverlight 2.0 and 3.0
• WPF and Visual Styles
• Expression Blend 3
• Microsoft Surface
• Windows Azure and Cloud Services
• WCF
• SOA

Agenda:

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WNY DNUG June Meeting

Date:  6/18/2009
Time:  6:00pm - 8:30pm
Topic:  SharePoint Applications - The Free and Easy Way
Presenter:  Denis Kitchen
Location:  Smartware Technologies - Tonawanda, NY
Registration:  Email events@wnydnug.org
Food:  Free food sponsored by Computer Plus Staffing Solutions
Swag:  Over 25 items. 

About the Presenter:

Denis Kitchen is currently an Application Developer for First Niagara Bank and Vice President of Data-N-Able, Inc. "Providing Manufacturing Data from the Shop Floor to the Top Floor". Notable Clients: Delphi Automotive, Dunlop TIre Corp., and Niagara Transformer.  Classic ASP developer since 1998, ASP.Net developer since 2001, SharePoint Developer since 2006  Educational background in Documentary Video Production, Media Arts, and Library Science (in other words, when it comes to programming, Denis is a shameless Hack).

More on the Presentation:

SharePoint Application Development, the Free and Easy Way.

SharePoint provides business end-users with many powerful features right out of the box. While having such a web platform can save a lot of time and effort, canned functionality and UI often fall short of customer needs. Intermediate and advanced ASP.Net developers can extend and customize SharePoint, but at the risk of great cost and complexity.

In this presentation we'll create two real-world solutions that leverage the Best of SharePoint, while avoiding the Worst.
1. A custom WebPart that enables your users to present their own data and documents in a hierarchical tree. Hey, why isn't this control built in to SharePoint already? Not to worry. We'll code one up in few minutes.
2. A full-featured web application for use by bank tellers. We'll leverage the goodies in SharePoint such as Lists, Document Libraries, Workflow, User Information, and Permissions, but we'll move beyond the limitations of SharePoint's User Interface. We'll use ASP.Net to tailor the UI to customer specifications, and even provide output options such as dynamically generated PDFs that comply with federal government regulations.

And if SharePoint isn't your thing, there will be plenty of other sights along the way. This presentation will demonstrate the following technologies:
Windows SharePoint Services 3.0
SharePoint Object Model
Workflow Foundation
CAML
Web Services
SmartPart
Visual Studio 2008
SharePoint Designer
Virtual PC
ASP.Net Web Forms and User Controls
JQuery
Blueprint CSS
LINQ

All the tools and techniques demonstrated in this presentation are available for FREE and avoid the major head-aches associated with custom SharePoint development.

Agenda:

WNY DNUG May Meeting

Date:  5/4/2009
Time:  6:00pm - 8:30pm
Topic:  Refactoring with Generics
Presenter:  Kathleen Dollard
Location:  Smartware Technologies - Tonawanda, NY
Registration:  Email events@wnydnug.org
Food:  Free food sponsored by Technisource
Swag:  Over 25 items.  Our main swag sponsor for this meeting is Red Gate Software. 

About the Presenter:

Kathleen Dollard is a consultant, author, trainer, and speaker. She’s been a Microsoft MVP for over ten years and has spoken about .NET in 28 states and 5 countries. She’s written dozens of articles including the "Ask Kathleen" column in Visual Studio Magazine. She also wrote "Code Generation in Microsoft .NET" (Apress). Her passion is helping programmers be smarter in how they develop by learning to better use .NET languages, libraries and platforms. She works with WPF, WF, as well as core technologies including System.AddIn. She’s currently creating template infrastructure for code generation using VB XML literals. After working on the problem of capturing business intent in metadata and test definitions for years, she’s working with industry improvements in these areas. She’s also working on full life cycle improvements, such as unit testing, better debugging and static analysis (FxCop). When not working, she enjoys woodworking, snowshoeing, and kayaking depending on the outdoor temperature.

More on the Presentation:

Generics open up new opportunities to increase the robustness of your code, improve its performance, and significantly reduce the total amount of code you write. After a brief introduction to generic syntax, Kathleen will show you how using generics improves the quality of your code. You’ll see how easy it is to shift your current collections to generic collections and learn how LINQ takes advantage of generic enumerable sets. You’ll learn how to write your own generic methods and classes. You’ll see how to leverage the spectrum of generic possibilities in a business object hierarchy that reduces the total lines of code by about 50%! Finally we’ll take a deep dive into nuances of generics, such as their relation to shared data, layered generics, reflection, and lambda expressions You’ll walk out of this talk understanding how to use generics to improve your own applications. 

 Agenda:

 

 

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WNY DNUG April Meeting

Date:  4/6/2009
Time:  6:00pm - 8:30pm
Topic:  What about Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF)?
Presenter:  Dan Martin
Location:  Buffalo State College (BULGER Communications Center North)
Registration:  Email events@wnydnug.org
Food:  Please bring $5 for food.
Swag:  Over 25 items to give out including Windows Vista Ultimate and Visual Studio 2008

About the presenter: 

Dan Martin is an independent consultant with over 25 years of varied IT experience, having supported clients from manufacturing and financial sectors working in a variety of roles spanning business process consulting activities through project management, n-tier Visual Basic development, various relational data base systems and SQL, web site development, and data analysis utilizing MS Excel and Access.

More on the presentation: 

WPF, the successor to Windows Forms, offers many new features and capabilities.  Since Windows Forms are still available, why learn all this new stuff like routed events and commands, animation, styling, triggers and templates, data validation and conversion?

In an effort to stoke the fires of learning, we will look at some of these features using examples which involve almost no code-behind (but a moderate amount of XAML).  After an overview of WPF, we will look into

• A very simple app that uses the WNYDNUG icon for a button
• A NorthWind Customer Report requiring 4 lines of written code (plus XAML)
• A  graphic with visual reflection and animation using absolutely no code-behind
• More examples depending on the time available

Video from presentation:

Presentation Resources:

 Download presentation resources here.  Dan has offered and will be happy to answer any questions at dhm01@roadrunner.com. 

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WNY DNUG February Meeting

Date:  Wednesday 2/18/2009
Time:  6:00pm - 8:30pm
Topic:  .NET and Flex
Presenter:  Peter Traeg
Location:  ITT Tech(Address and Directions)
Registration:  Email events@wnydnug.org
Food:  Sponsored by PSI
Swag:  Over 25 items to give out

Click here for meeting slides.

Meeting Links (From Greg Murnock): 

Flex and AIR:
http://www.adobe.com/products/air/showcase/
http://www.refreshingapps.com/
http://flex.org/showcase/
http://scalenine.com/showcase/
 
Training and other info:
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flex/?navID=gettingstarted
http://tv.adobe.com/ - search on Flex, Flash, or AIR to get 100s of videos from 3 min to multiple hours of training, instruction, and cool stuff.

 

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WNY DNUG January Meeting

Date:  Thursday 1/22/2009
Time:  6:00pm - 8:30pm
Topic:  LINQ to SQL
Presenter:  Dave Stevenson
Location:  KnowledgeAir (Address and Directions)
Registration:  Email events@wnydnug.org
Food:  Sponsored by Superior Technical Resources
Swag:  Over 25 items to give out

 

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